Back to Avatar Hunting
by Red Clay
Summary: The Avatar stripped her of her Firebending.  She settled.  Eight years passed.  Peace.  But now an old ghost brings disturbing news.  The father of her child is long dead.  Killed by the Avatar.  Now all is journeying vengeance.   Sequel to Ardent Flame.
1. Idyll Threats

__Read Ardent Flame to gather context. Otherwise, dive right in and hope you can butterfly.__

_Bryke owns Avatar: The Last Aibender. This is fun._

_Critique as wanted.  
><em>

**Idyll Threats**

For eight summers it grew. Even beneath the cold shadow of beneficent doubt - hope - it grew. Like a stomach of bitter jagged gastropods, she had ignored it, allowed it to juggle and roll about within her as it gestated.

To the breaking point.

To hatch.

To seed.

It grew and there was no going back, no amends to be made save the swift blind journey of cathartic vehemence.

But before the crusade, one stop.

Off the train, wind caught her stringy black tresses. He never made direct mention of it, as was his divertive ilk, but she knew he liked long hair. To think, he would never tell her in some oblique offhanded comment. She would never hear those words.

In slavering mouthfuls came the noon barking. Wares flew from hand to unwashed hand flew spit-shined, tarnished, embroidered, lacy, half-finished, putrefied, vintage, racy, tasty with a side of unexpected relief, obtuse, hand-carved, silver oak sheet fine lattice textile dry honeyed wheat and summer dust. Some were worth it. Others were even paid for. And the woman with the black hair, a doleful force, glided through the market mobs of Xidezhen. Despite her relatively light steps, precarious plates were brought to crash as she passed by, hot and dry with a spool of steel thread twanging in the small of her back like a stressed dulcimer.

Passed the hairdresser. Through the market. There.

* * *

><p><em>Some minutes before:<em>

A crumpled ballad unfolded from the creases of a blind bard behind a hefty ten-string Shunxi. It struck her curious, the howling vagabond who played the part elegantly. His desperate vagrancy sang from every part of him and some parts that surrounded him. Walking past made one's joints ache with the prospect of age. Even his instrument felt vintage overtaking its pegs and ribs, though it would never betray that feeling to the passive listeners.

While grandpa Ozai dozed precariously in a creaky chair at the back of the house and Aimi, merry with the heat of the day, busied herself over her ancient iron cookware (something with meat in it, for a change), a mother and son listened to the rhapsodist half-a-block down.

"He's not really blind," stated the seven year-old Zhen, unshakably sure of himself.

His mother asked, "How do you know that?"

"Because of his sign." The boy pointed to the sign resting before the musician's yawning instrument case. The board was splinted and dingy, but the calligraphy was impeccable, if a little crowded:

_Never the joy of a surprise visit from yourself. Honest bother of your own constant company. Give to the strange and feel their joy. _

"Perhaps someone wrote it for him," postulated Zhen's mother.

"But why wouldn't they help him more than just taking dictation?"

The mother slit her eyes with regard for this question. "Do you really think he needs help?"

The wrinkled bard's broken caterwaul slid sporadically flat and sharp, as if scrambling for purchase of the key.

"Yes and no," Zhen concluded. "I think it's an act. More than just the performance."

Mother smiled slightly. "You should go and ask. Ascertain the truth."

"I don't need to. I can tell."

"Can you really? At a glance, you truly know that man?"

"More fun to imagine who he is. He could be anyone: an assassin or a fugitive or an old mad king."

"And how will you ever truly know if you do not ask?"

"He wouldn't tell me. He can't tell anyone. Otherwise _they_ would find him, and he doesn't want to be found. That's why he's like that."

The two of them became a silent audience once more, sitting on the porch, drinking in the sun and song. The woman pulled her layers in tighter. It was hot, but not hot enough for her taste. It had been a cold eight years. For her anyway.

Zhen rose after a few refrains. "I'm going to get my pad and inks."

"To practice your characters."

"Well… does he count as a character?"

She smirked at her son and conveyed an allowing blink.

The song of suicidal sacrifice in an ancient war continued and she half-listened until a presence made itself known and stopped at the foot of the steps up to her.

It was a woman: stringy dark hair and steeled green eyes. What this woman said, stirred something in the mother, stirred a lifetime up from the oblivion silt of nearly a decade gone by.

* * *

><p><em>There. Now.<em>

"Azula."

The former Fire Nation Princess, Phoenix's Harlot, and former master Firebender balked. As she made her way to the edge of the deck, she realized who it was that had turned up on her doorstep.

It was Nuan. It was Qilaq's friend.

Both names stirred fresher memories in her. Vivid memories. The final days of that old life.

"Where is he?" Nuan demanded without raising her childlike voice. In spite of the precocious nature of her timbre, it was powerful.

"Who…?" Azula asked as she tried to rally. She managed a cool mien almost instantly, but the inner shock continued to storm inside her. Then it struck her. "The Avatar is gone. He has been for some years now. Do you really think he'd waste his life watch-dogging me when there are so many other worthy problems to attend?"

A hush between them before the Earthbender laughed once, noticing Azula's homely state not unlike an empty burgundy robe, faded, hung and forgotten in the corner.

"Don't worry your banty neck," assured Nuan in spite of her vindictive edge. "I'm not here for you, though I don't think anyone would be poorer for the loss."

Azula almost took a step forward, but restrained herself, opting to remain as passive as possible for the sake of all in the home behind her. "I think my son might disagree, you doing away with his only parent."

"Hmph. Playing the only parent defense, huh?" Nuan adopted a superior smile. "I figure I'd be doing your bastard a solid."

With little more than a slight shrug, all the muscles beneath Azula's calm skin rolled taught, twisted with wrath like a thousand thousand catapults bent near breaking and entirely ablaze. Passed the seething, the calculating part of her mind panicked at the prospect of battling a bender, especially a soldier, retired or not. Azula had no more will over the flame, but then it occurred to her that most were unaware of that, even if they were aware of who she was beneath her modern alias. She could play the part. She would only need the prospect of her reputable fury. It was enough.

Even beneath the folds of clothing, Nuan warily observed her foe's sub-dermal tension. She hocked a detersive snort - a mannerism adopted from years under her young master's tutelage. Even if the Firebender was still on top of her game, Nuan had a few surprises that not even a seasoned witch like her would see coming. However, the Metalbender knew only rumors and half-drunk tales of the Fire Princess in combat.

Dire rumors.

And at such intimate range to use her new, hardly-tested wire?

"Mom? Who's…?" he paused, understanding that non-heat, that smokeless flame, which occasionally radiated from his mother. "What's wrong?" He was a smart boy. Strangers were sparse and anyone - strange or familiar - giving his mom that look meant something serious has happened.

Or is about to happen.

"Go back inside," Azula austerely instructed, adding: "I'm taking care of it."

Zhen did as was demanded of him, and there was more ringing quiet accompanied by the plucking of the nearby "blind" minstrel.

Azula had been searching for her old voice. That tone that once came so easily to her was rotting somewhere in her, but it was there. She only needed to find it, and quick! Now! Now is the time!

"Speak ill of my son again, and I'll make a noose from your spine and hang your boned carcass in the square."

_PiTAANG! _knelled ten Shunxi strings as they snapped in unison under an angry force.

Azula felt her porch move a centimeter to the left. Aimi cursed the slight distraction that caused her to overexert her flip and fling half the pan of pulled komodo-chicken onto the floor. She swore she heard something fall to the ground in the backroom. The once prodigious Firebender remained far more stolid than the building and its foundation.

"Why the Avatar?"

Nuan let the Earth from her telekinetic grip and sighed, much like her old (young) self.

"You know why."

"No. I really don't."

"Uh huh… look, I don't expect you to tell me, now, after all these years. Anywho, I don't need or want your help. I just thought I'd warn you. Get it out of the way. Get _you_ out of my way. If I ever see you again, I'll peel you like a banana. Then I might kill you." the Metalbender darkled further. "If I'm feeling nice."

Azula made no move to respond, violently or otherwise.

"I probably could have gotten him back from you… but… the Avatar…" Nuan thrummed. "He took Qilaq from me forever."

Nuan said no more and glided away, back into the market mob. Back into roaming obscurity.

The old musician was still grasping at his broken strings, cursing a god for each in ten languages. Either that or it was all just gibbering, senseless mania. A passerby threw a coin.

Aimi stepped out, half-full frying pan still gripped and steaming in her thin hand. She addressed her housemate on the porch, whom from she perceived a thick miasma of apprehension. "Shila?

"…"

"Who was that?"

"…"

"Is everything alright?"

"…"

"Shila?"

Zhen stepped around Aimi. He wanted to lay a comforting hand on his tense mother, but, for the first time in his life, feared her touch. "Mom?"

Azula invoked five words and as they passed hot into the air, she saw the leagues ahead. The fringes. The old ghosts. The dead. All ahead.

"I've got someone to hunt."


	2. Taken with Traveling Memories

_Maybe. Maybe we'll do this. Maybe._

_Critique as desired._

_EDIT: 9/10/2011  
><em>

**Taken with Traveling Memories**

Zhen reigned in his urge to cry. Even with Grandpa Ozai and Aunty Aimi, buzzing about, distracting themselves with chores that they had already done an hour before, the house felt lifeless. Empty. It felt cold with her absence. This was not helped by Zhen standing in the backroom, kept free of clutter or furniture and used as a quiet place to escape the growing metropolis outside. A place for contemplation. Drawing. Meditating. A place of windows his mom had boarded up.

He remembered vividly seeing her silhouetted, light falling around her as she bit small wood tacks in her teeth and hammered and grumbled and shut out the light that fell so sharply around her shape.

He dried his eyes and wondered if aunty Aimi felt the same when Lee left. She had been awfully busy for no reason, these past days, perhaps making up for those two.

The dark room to shut out the world. And on the far wall, a thick board set up. Zhen ran his finger over it and felt the random deep slices grouped at its center. Deep scars in the hard wood.

Deep scars.

* * *

><p>From the womb of the woods, she emerged, squinting in the daylight outside Wulong Forest. With a dull thud, the woman discards her moderate bundle. Walking is never this hard when the path is familiar. Her legs had forgotten the burn of protracted distances with little more than the idea of destination. Thus, Kyoshi Island was barely an inkling to her feet, but of course it was there. Everywhere exists, even if your feet haven't yet known it.<p>

"…!" Azula stopped walking.

That sounded too much like Uncle. She took out the teabag that she had been reusing for the duration of her begun journey and scolded it with her eyes. It was still a little damp, yet still made fine tea, or at least made stale water bearable. For a moment she thought to discard the gift her estranged elder had mailed her last summer. Lucky to hold onto it this long and not lose it in a fit of cleaning, but also a little annoyed at the reminder of tiresome anecdotes. Not so tiresome as when she was young, but still sigh-inducing.

She stretched wide, arching her back, straining taught the fibers of her fresh carmine sari, cut short for battle. She was tired. She barely had the strength to move, put she took the trouble.

In a flash woman spun - black tresses exploding out - and 'leashed a heavy kunai into the soil near the roots of a conifer. The metal implement, despite its angular thickness at the middle, disappeared wholly into the earth.

"My next dart will go through that trunk," Azula portended. "Don't doubt that."

The stalker behind the wide pine remained dubious, before he considered the source. The tree was a decade thick, but he was taught better than to undervalue any threat, least of all one trailing a lightning quick dart.

The young man came out from his cover. "I don't, Aunty," he said, masking a surprised terror.

Lee had never heard her so pointed. Actually, that was a lie. She was always pointed, but it was a soft point. Little jabs and sarcasms. Wisdom garbed in biting cynicism. Always with better purpose, though. But now she was different - changed in a way that he had never seen before. This new viciousness was unlike her. Wanton. Deadly.

Azula took a narrow climbing hook (quite sharper than it needed to be) and strode toward the strapping teenager. He found himself tense and guarded. She strode closer with… _purpose_ in her narrow eyes.

Lee drew up and found the handle of one of his kai sickles. A ghost of a dream entered his mind. He _did_ remember her like this once. Once in the dark, against the entire village, it seemed.

And fire.

He remembered fire lashing from her in brilliant trails, cutting the night to bleed orange and explode. But he had never seen her Firebend since and he was so young and it was so dark. It must have been a dream. Only a dream. Right?

The woman was almost upon him. Inches. He braced, unsure whether or not to defend or preempt.

Too late.

Azula blew past the young man and used the hook to fish her kunai from its burrow.

"Go home," she said as she passed him again, going back to her pack.

"No."

She stopped.

A pause for wind.

"I'm a man now. I'll go where I like."

The overthrown princess moved on to her pack. "Is that so? I'd hate to see your mother, finding out you're stalking woman for miles without so much as a word. An unhealthy pastime for a man to take up."

Lee almost growled. "Aunty, I'm not going to press you for a reason why you just up and left."

"That is wise."

"But leaving everyone like that - worried and totally in the dark - we knew it was something serious. Probably important. Mom and Granddad are fine to just let you go and even to take care of Zhen for you… but that's not enough for me. What if you run into bandits or platypus-bears or… or poachers?" The last worldly danger Lee listed was almost like a question to himself, rather than his aunt.

Azula scoffed. "Though my skin is quite lustrous, I very much doubt my pelt would be worth the trouble. As for the hypothetical rest, I'm sure they'll recover just fine."

Lee raised a dubious eyebrow. He'd never seen her fight anything more than the air in the training room and, on bad days, walls of the training room. There were a lot of dents in the walls. Lee lowered his dubious eyebrow.

"What if they're benders? F-Firebenders or something?"

Azula froze. "And what makes you think you'd be any help if we ran into Firebenders?" she asked as though trying to turn him to stone with her even timbre.

"Well, I… I may not be a bender either, but at least we'd stand a better chance together. Even without bending, superior numbers are superior. I think you said that once."

"No, I didn't," was the instant and accurate reply.

Lee dropped his attempt at reason and opted instead for stubborn. It was working for her. It might work for him. He pulled back his shoulders and lowered his voice into his chest. "I'm going with you, Aunty."

Azula got a chance to dust off some of her old sarcasm. "I can hear by your manly tone that you will not be dissuaded. So… I won't dissuade you."

Lee's apprehension - all the stress and fear that had been building in him since he had first set out after her, all the rehearsed persuasions he doubted - evaporated away and he smiled. It wasn't direct, but it was close enough.

"But if you must address me," Azula amended, "from now on, refer to me as 'Sifu'."

Lee blinked. "But you said never to-"

"Consider 'never' ended!" she snapped, but felt the outburst unnecessary. (And unnecessarily eclectic. Damn tea.)

A different apprehension took Lee by the throat.

"You didn't deserve that, Lee. I appreciate your concern and your point about the benders is well taken, if a little paranoid. Still, I'd rather you returned home, or at least found a more worthy cause to follow after. You're out on your own, now. You should relish your freedom."

Lee, stupidly stalwart as he was - in no way resembling the manner of his resting father - made an ignorant claim: "No cause could be more worthy than helping you…" he bowed "…Sifu."

She resisted the urge to groan. Too much of her old cynicism. "Sifu will do. Don't bow to me again." Azula paused and seemed to reevaluate her instructions. "Or if you do, make sure it's a deep bow."

The woman shifted her mood and silently examined a dark notion as her godson took to her heels. Would he ever discover the fate of his brother - discover that familiar murderer - Azula would not begrudge him his revenge. Not that she would let him have it. None would stop her. Not until her hunt was done.

"Are we heading somewhere in particular?"

"Kyoshi Island."

"Kyoshi? What's there that's so important?"

"Do you remember me mentioning a woman named Ty Lee?"

Lee was slow and steady with his response, sorting through the fragments of seldom stories that his god-mother had sprinkled over the seasons. "I. Think. So… Yeah." Circus… something.

The young man couldn't see her face, but it sounded like she was smiling. "Now you get to meet her."

* * *

><p>Her name is Liu Mi of the Island of Kiyoshi.<p>

She is proud.

She paints herself with that pride. It is ghost white beneath a red brow. It is silken beryl in her dress. It is immortal in her leather armor. She is not afraid to flaunt, flirt, and challenge the boys, whom she soundly beats every time. She likes to fish with her hands, though - perhaps because - it is difficult.

Liu Mi is running scared.

Her immortal beryl armor still folded by the riverside she is escaping. Running toward the village. The others would help. She never thought she would so desperately need their help, but it would save her. She knew it.

Still running.

A tree branch nicks her bare cheek.

Still running.

Another branch ducked.

Still running.

A ostrich-cougar leap over a fell tree taller than her fishy smelling cabin.

Still running.

Another branch. It splits in twain so flat and clean like no sword sharper than Death itself could make.

Her foot parts from her like the branch.

Still running.

Falling.

Tumbling, scraping, fallen.

Stopped all but dead.

She _hics_ air and her strong lungs burn, not from overexertion. She still has miles of running in her. It is the looming behind her, the slow walking, the horrible squeal of coiling wire that causes her gasping.

Liu Mi knows what stands behind her. She dresses her face with as much pride as she can muster. It is not enough, but it is all she has now. Not enough to meet those eyes regarding her. Those terrible eyes obscured by a wild black mane. Regarding her like the leavings of a Herculean beetle.

It is Liu Mi's Death.

But first, Death has some questions.


	3. A Kyoshi Lament

_**Continuity Edit to Previous Chapter.** _Such is the nature of an unplanned narrative. It's much more planned now.

**A Kyoshi Lament**

_Eyes always watch the shadows. *scribblescribble* Ask the watchmen and __we? __they will tell, from *scribble* turret over sleeping fort to chair on creaking porch, pregnant (?) is the dark with terrible possibility. *doodle* And the vigilant guard against the dark, always. *scaryfacedoodle* "Stop that!"* It is for this reason that those who wish to go unseen veil themselves elsewhere. *scribble* A frightening notion that the sentries have come to find. Holding the panoramic blackness *"that's good"* at bay seems all we can do, without sparing an eye for the lamplight at our back. For the warm rooms of our homes. *"I am awesome"* Our best guard seems never to be enough and when it (inevitably) fails *doom!* we falter. *?* _

Sokka balled up that hurried speech in his palm nicked with fresh cuts. Hooks and nets always seemed to get under his skin at the start of the new fishing season.

His first draft was much better. Much more direct. Would work this crowd best. He would read the first draft.

A breeze beneath the lintel and another entered.

In lavender trails did the mourning stream, from every doorway left open, winding down the streets entwining as they climbed from the slope of the town, the confluence at the town hall, at dawn, after the young fisherman trafficked out in their hand-me-down boats to drag for their first catches. Fishing was necessary to keep the village "above water" as it was so punnily put time and again by a certain Water Tribesman long turned local. The few sailing out, still would rather have paid their respects and perhaps worked doubly hard the next day. Unrealistic and not worth the cost, but still… they knew where their hearts were that day. And they knew her spirit would understand. It would be irked and snide about it, but it would understand.

The Kyoshi totem, mounting the oaken pillar in the center of town, hung its head in reverence for her fallen daughter. Even her face paint seemed to run today. Much had been running recently. And it hadn't rained for a long time.

The whole village turned out for the viewing. Some were decked out in full Kyoshi battle regalia and second guessing their decision to attend in full makeup. Others were dressed more simply, somberly with ocean and jade cloth. Sokka was the latter. Suki was most fully the former, but she never second guessed herself. The whole day before was a careful frenzy of preparation, polishing sigils, fans, ornaments. Grinding her katana to a whining edge. Ordering every single silken jade thread of her attire.

Were her eyes baggy from lack of sleep, Sokka thought, or…?

He tugged his long "warrior's wolf tail" taught, patted his eight year-old son to stop poking his five year-old little sister, and rose before the alter. Liu Mi lay in her battledress with that severe look (as she willed) and a blanket of poppies covering her (not in her will but pretty).

"Peace," Sokka started declaratively. It was a full house. "It's hard to make. Even harder to maintain. Those who would break it stalk every shadow, lurk behind every shroud. We all fought for this. Liu Mi was a proponent of peace and-"

"_Achoo!… _gah…" Lee regretted the sneeze even as it left his face. He shrank at the back of the room, into his cloak, felt his concealed weapons dig into his back and his hand itching to clutch one. He really felt uncomfortable here. In this village and _especially_ in this room. Imagine all the tortuous scenarios behind those hundred villager eyes that had trained on him. But this was where Aun… Sifu had bid him attend, despite him having no knowledge of the victim *strikethat* girl *strikethat* _young woman_. The thought of Sifu finding him fled his post… he weathered this discomfort gratefully.

It was in this interruption (he recognized the well-meaning kid from his inn on the beach) that Sokka, for all his panic, noticed someone - an old enemy turned friend - was missing. It didn't help him in getting back on track.

"Liu Mi was proud," Suki called out before rising. She shone in spite of the twilight room. Her battle crown shimmered, crisp new leather glistened proudly and the custom blue inlays that her husband had painstakingly (so many little cuts in his hands) added were ostentatious and lovely for it.

"As a Kiyoshi Warrior should be. Perhaps beyond that, in her case. I knew it put some of you… off. I often found myself furious with her bruskness. But she never deserved…" the woman rallied, not able to go there just yet. Not in public, anyway.

She diverted: "I also know she was fighting in the end. She couldn't _not_ have been…"

A pause and search for words.

"Our best guard never seems to be enough, and when it fails we falter."

Suki slipped her gloved fingers into her husbands scarred, shaky palm and smiled up at him warmly. The shaking stopped. His son and daughter came up and hugged at his legs, almost knocking him over.

Sokka took the cue and took up the speech:

"We question our station and what real good it does. How can we guard against the deep unknown and why? Never does it yield the worst monsters. They always come from where we cannot guard. Dear places. So why bother? I've thought this before. Thought to quit and shut myself away. I've been hopeless. But never again. Like Liu Mi, I will never falter. I shall always be so brave as her. We should all aspire to that courage. That was Liu Mi, and it still is. Her legacy, her courage, ever lives on."

And a slight whisper passed from the alter, unheard by ears. It approved and took its rest.

* * *

><p>The long pink scarf concealing her neck whipped wildly with the wind. The bay stunk extra good today and the firm breeze over the treetops was the best vantage from which to drink it in. At the shore it was keen, for sure, but high on the wind above the forest, it took on a much crisper taste, mingled with other verdant smells.<p>

The long blue sky. The loopy sea hawks. The chipmunk-rabbits making those scuttly little sounds on the wood. The arms of the island hugging the bay. She let her mind wander away from lament, if only for a moment. For the sake of her sanity. Her friend would understand the reprieve.

"Hiding, Ty Lee? Are you so afraid to face death?"

The voice from the ground far below was strange and familiar. It didn't sound like a threat. More like a humble query and, considering the circumstances, a reasonable question.

The scarcely human orchid of a woman floated deftly from her lofty perch atop a high pine. Her touch on each branch was lighter than a whisper. She landed and, catlike, drew herself up to meet this intruder. Some woman, long in the face and black hair. Sharp eyed and… something on the tip of her mind. Someone.

"That was mean of you. Who do you think you…" - the revelation was neck-snappingly swift. - "…are."

As Azula spread her arms, a gleaming black kunai in each had, Ty Lee closed the distance before Time could catch her, her fists balled, knuckles bared and ready to punch organs into paste.

The kunai dropped. Azula made no move to defend. She lowered her head and found that, luckily, the other woman had stopped a coarse hairs breadth from smashing Azula's solar plexus into her spine.

Face to face, Azula observed how little time had touched her old friend. Still the braid. Still the button face. Still the grey eyes. Her dress seemed a shade drab - tones taken from pine needles rich in their spring green, trimmed in goldenrod and a bright fall fulvous sash - but only in contrast the image Azula held and fostered of her childhood companion. The gaudy pink scarf tried to make up for it, but her aura was still found wanting, Azula assumed.

"Why are you here?" Ty Lee asked, withdrawing her fist and putting a space between her and her visitor.

Azula cut straight to the chase. "The funeral. I'm certain I know who did this. If you're willing… you can join me. I, too, am seeking a retribution. She isn't my specific target, but we seek… we'll likely meet along the way. You could find your friend, Liu Mi's, killer. It could be… cathartic."

"What makes you think I'm into that sort of thing, Azula?"

The civet woman's mouth curled at a corner and made Ty Lee's blood run cold with deliberately forgotten ghosts.

"Are you leaving me a choice?" the flexible woman averred.

"Someone you love has been taken from you," Azula said, "and that harbinger of hate is roaming free. Roaming your world. And you can do something about it. A responsibility to affect change. I ask, do you even have a choice?"

Ty Lee bowed her head but kept her eyes locked on her old "friend."

Then Azula did something unexpected, again.

She wavered.

"Alright, I'm sorry for that. It came out a little… too familiar, I'm sure." Her timbre was still glib, but not as confident as the Kyoshi warrior remembered. "I didn't mean it that way. This time, I just really need your help, Ty Lee. Not want, but _need. _I honestly couldn't see myself winning the coming battle. Not the way I am. Not alone. And I don't know how you feel about it, but I'd rather _not_… die."

Ty Lee remained mum. For all her unchanging features, she was very much a grown up. Her brightness was undimming, but her naiveté had been culled long ago. Azula had been the first to strike it and slowly hack it away. For that, Ty Lee reasoned to storm off. Tell her off! Tell her to go and kill and enjoy it like old times _alone_!

"I can wait," Azula said. She let her arm swing once weakly. "…or leave if you've already found your answer."

But that wasn't Ty Lee. It never had been and it never would be. However…

"I will not be used."

"!"

"What's more, Liu Mi is murdered and days later you turn up?"

"T-Ty Lee… I didn't…"

"Don't do that!" It took all her fortitude to scream. Hearing Azula stammer shook Ty Lee like nothing she had experienced. "No games! No acts! All you've ever done is play people, myself included and nothing you could say-"

"He killed my lover!"

Ty Lee blinked. She was almost surprised.

"The father of my child."

Azula w-with a… a kid! Now she was surprised. Another lie? Likely. But...

"I can wait," Azula said. She let her arm swing once weakly. "…or leave if you've already found your answer."

Ty Lee suppressed the urge to sigh.

* * *

><p><strong>In retrospect, I thought about killing somebody significant (read: canon) and giving them that speech from Sokka, but thought better of it. Too much flaming would likely come of killing someone important.<strong>


	4. Trusting Traitors

_First part draws a bit of inspiration from here: sylvacoer Deviant Art .com/gallery/97187?offset=24/d2uh3hg_

_Warning: A little graphic._

**Trusting Traitors **

She danced the green room red.

It was drab morning in the dojo at the fringe of town. She was leading a set in full armor, the entire contingent of Kyoshi Warriors similarly garbed and one move behind her staggered forms. Then a light entered the room. Azula had returned. Returned from some infernal oubliette in the entrails of the capital city prison. Returned in all her glorious posture and madness. Returned that vicious smile, that knowing look at Ty Lee, who started. Paused. And smiled back.

Ty Lee dreamt this shortly after war's end. An angry diamond of a dream that struck her harder than any physical experience she had suffered. Even after ruminating on the matter and realizing that it was completely against anything she would ever do to her sisters in arms, especially after so many years, making friendships so deep that they may as well have been blood-ties.

Ty Lee decorated in gore.

Something like being home again, and glad to please Azula. No remorse for her stalwart new girlfriends, whom she had mutilated so curtly, so easily. Glad her friend was back and smiling and laughing genuinely and not in prison and insa… And everything was just fine and back to normal from then on.

The horror was that there was none. There was no horror, no vertiginous lurch out of covers into the cold sweat of midnight. It was not a nightmare. Just a vivid predication. The fan gold dripping blood, her Kyoshi veil stained a comfortable crimson.

The thought that she would so thoughtlessly betray someone she loved…

That horrified her.

* * *

><p>What's wrong, Ty Lee?" Sokka asked taking a seat beside his troubled lady friend. "I mean… besides the obvious." He looked around the mellow hall, all but empty until the final ceremonies at sunset. "You just look… distracted <em>and <em>sad."

Ty Lee rejoined with a shrug, "It's a funeral."

"Point taken. Still…" Sokka remembered how Ty Lee had tried her hardest over these past few days to insert a glimmer of pep and happiness into the town. It was received in mixed ways. The Fire Nation girl had also been a strong shoulder to cry on for family and friends of the passed. Sokka assumed that even Ty Lee got sad and grieved, but she was very guarded about it and it was such an odd look on her that Sokka couldn't help but be concerned.

Suki padded in. Each acknowledged one another wordlessly. Suki sat on the pew on the other side of the sulking sylph.

Ty Lee took a breath. Let it out. "An old friend of mine is in town."

Sokka tried to fill the cheer void, "Well, that sounds great. Old friends are great comfort, and a friend of yours is a-"

"She's needs my help."

"Oh… not so great?"

"Anything we can do?" Suki offered.

Ty Lee responded with a burdened heart, "She wants me to go with her. She's on a… a trip."

"So go," Sokka said. "I'm sure we'll manage fine without you. It's not like the warriors have something pressing that needs doing. _Ha ha _they don't, right?" Sokka cut himself off, searching his wife for her captain-of-the-guard approval.

Suki offered an agreeable nod and giggle. "Ty Lee, we can handle things as they are. If you're feeling up to it, and you need to go, then go."

"Yeah," Sokka joined. "It's not like we're holding you here like some kind of prisoner that came out wrong didn't it?"

"Sokka," scolded his wife half-heartedly.

The ladies laughed.

The laughing done, Ty Lee drooped again. "I just… I don't know if I should. What she wants to do and… I've been… she may not be deserving of it. But really deep down, something tells me I have to help her. I don't want to listen, but I don't feel I have a choice. It would be wrong to turn on her ag… and I feel like I need to be there to keep her from making a mistake."

Suki placed a comforting hand on her honorable friend's back. "If you feel that she needs you, you should go. You should do what's right."

It would be easy to just leave. Just leave without telling them and coming back and they'd never be the wiser as to who Ty Lee was helping. Or what she was helping do. She didn't even have to lie now. She had the whole journey to come up with something. Just leave and…

But that wasn't Ty Lee.

"It's Azula."

The cursed word rang in the muted room and between the ears of both Sokka and Suki.

Sokka balked, "Wha…you mean… _she's… here? In town? Now?_"

Suki was all action, up and out the door at a brisk, determined walk.

"It's been a long time, Sokka." Ty Lee intoned. The tribesman was still _dumb_founded. Ty Lee didn't look at him. "I need to do something. I can't not. She's going to hurt someone."

Sokka, fresh from the narrow haze of shock, noticed his wife had left. "Yeah." He hurried out.

* * *

><p>The rimy captain scratched his armpit with discomfort for the itch and the tension wadding up toward the apex of town. And the severe Fire Nation gal, whose presence made his skin feel like it would rather be on fire.<p>

Scratch.

"Ill tide, coming into port on a funeral day. There's still rites to be wrung before all's set… right." He scratched again, considering the spelling of his words with a skyward glance. Azula coughed deliberatly. He looked back. "I told ya now, we ain't goin' back 'till yev paid your respects proper this evening. No unfinished business welcome on any boat. Understand?"

"Vaguely," Azula sighed. Then she tried small talk, for a change of pace. "Are you familiar with this island?"

"Hmm?" He gave her an appraisal. She seemed disinterested, but he had moored and swabbed and re-rigged 'til his hands were raw and the day was just begun. Not many of the folk in the town gave him much notice. Even the garbling dock master did little more than foam at him, though he did almost run his boat through the dock on arrival. "Familiar enough. Not a local - High North Archipelago is home, mostly. But I'm traveled. Hafta be when ferryin' is your stock and trade. And I know a thing or two about watching the mood."

"'Ill tides,' yes."

The captain threw out a full _Ha! _"You're smart, aren't ya, ma'am?" There was ever so slightly the hint of sarcasm, which Azula could smell even beneath thirty years of sea salt sweat (rough estimate) and forty plus years of alcoholism (smoother estimate).

"Smart enough."

Scratch.

The boatmen snorted through his sun-scarred nose, and chuckled low. "Well, then you know my situation. Plus, I still got another passenger in town, and he's paid up to where I wouldn't want to leave him." A substantial customer.

"I know, though not paid up enough to leave with old ghosts attached," Azula said, vacantly redirecting her attention to the condition of the vessel. Not a sturdy steamer, but the wood and periwinkle sail gleamed with unusual care, despite their obvious age. Vintage. Not cheap to keep in working order.

"No coin worth old ghosts, especially on Tui's lovely face? Jealous girl, she is. But I'm sure you're willowware, being so sm… here now. I think that's him up town?" Azula turned her attention up the slope of the town. It was maybe a quarter mile away, but the main drag was wide and uncluttered, save a few souls. She was inwardly impressed with the seaman's keen sight. Unless he was toying with her.

But he wasn't and something wasn't right. Someone was moving toward Lee with speed from behind. And he didn't seem to notice.

"Oh, somethin' ain't right," the mariner said.

"Your money is in trouble." Azula said this an instant before she was bolting down the dock and up into town.

The ferryman was suddenly very distressed.

* * *

><p>"You!" Suki screamed.<p>

Lee jumped almost all the way around and managed: "Me…?" As she bore down on him, the hapless Fire Nation colonial tripped over himself trying to escape the frightening woman with unwarranted murder in her eyes.

Suki was unarmed, having set her weapons down at home when she took the kids back. Regardless, she still had her hands, and those were carried as such that Lee would rather be faced with a couple hundred pointy implements.

He remembered Au… Sifu mentioning not to draw his weapons under any circumstance and he held to her orders like life threats, because they felt like they were life threats.

Suki grabbed up the fumbling youth by his cloak. "You came into town the day after it happened. You have some connection to her, I know it! Tell me where she is!"

"I…I…I…I…" was all that came from Lee between shakes.

A bystander called from his porch: "Suki? What are you doing to that poor boy?"

She didn't need to tell him to shut up and stay out of it. Her raging eyes were enough.

The distraction was enough that Lee seized his opportunity to squirm free. Unfortunately, he made the somatic mistake of kicking her to get loose. The woman took it with more surprise than pain. In fact, Lee didn't see that he had discouraged her in the least. Quite the opposite.

Again, he was rash. The fear for his life overwrought his judgment and he pulled out one of his sickles. Though he hadn't thought, he hoped in the reflexive part of his optimistic heart, that the drawn weapon would deter his attacker, but before the hope had time to fade, the still sheathed kama was briskly wrenched from his hand, which nearly snapped backwards under the dangerous lady's grip.

And again, to Suki's growing surprise, Lee somehow managed to free himself from her hold. He even managed to retain his arm, unbroken.

The frenzied Kyoshi Warrior threw down the weapon (farming tool?) and took a moment to fill her victim with debilitating fear. Perhaps confess something before she broke him, which would happen in any case.

Lee was straining to utter something, anything to placate the fearsome spirit of war-dressed malignance, but it was all unintelligible blahs and whines. One hand found his other kama in the small of his back and loosened it from its sheath. But he didn't draw.

"Suki, stop!" a familiar voice demanded. It was Sokka. "Why are you roughing up that kid. That doesn't look like _her_ to me."

"He came here right after Liu Mi was killed! And look at him! He's been skulking around town all week. He's…" Suki stopped short when she saw her husbands leathery brow searching the distance and then rise into something she hadn't seen in years. A primordial fright.

A sharp boot came down hard in the dusty road.

All eyes turned on _her_, the old ghost returned in mellow burgundy poise, unflinching.

Sokka managed, "Now _that_ looks like her."


	5. It Has Become Fall

-1_A bit of practice for writing another person's characters: Omnischriber. Go read his stuff. It's different than mine. I like his writing more than mine, really, but then, I hate my writing 'cause I'm so stuck in it. I Don't think I pinned his characters this time, what with the glancing justice I gave them, but I've got some years of age to use as an excuse for any out-of-character eccentricities, I guess._

**It Has Become Fall**

"I remember you," Azula called up the street to the intimidating ghostly visage before her. Her focus remained fixed on the antagonist as she whispered to a stunned Lee: (Run for the dock.) "The Kyoshi captain, correct?" Lee hesitated. (Now!) The sharp whisper was as good as a slap to the face and he broke for the dock.

"How dare you?" Suki hissed hard enough to convince the air it was venom. She didn't care about the boy anymore. All her attention zeroed in on the real threat. "How dare you come here and-"

"I didn't kill her. I hadn't yet arrived, though I think I may know who _did_ kill Liu Mi."

"If you _speak_ her _name_ again I'll personally see that you choke on it," Suki growled to turn the tail between even dragon legs. "I swear on Avatar Kyoshi's soul, those will be your last words."

"Consider a moment, why would I, after eight years, come back here and commit a random, isolated killing."

"I don't pretend to understand your demented logic."

"Then why _pretend_ that I killed her?"

"Suki, she may actually be telling the truth."

"You're _siding_ with _her! _And, 'the _truth'?_"

"Whoa, hey. I'm not siding with her. Believe me, I want her out of here just as bad as you, but this scenario doesn't fit her methods."

A reasonable tribesman, Azula mused. "Precisely."

"Don't help me!"

"Almost ten years," Suki lashed out at her husband. "That's ten years for her to get worse. Don't tell me you haven't worried every day that she'd come back. Worried that she'd take revenge for the throne and bending and life we took from her."

"I… but why _us_?" Sokka retorted, not arguing that that very thought Suki just expressed had plagued him as an allergy of fear. "That makes no sense, and she may be juicy cactus-hat-crazy, but not without some basic guiding principles."

'Standing right here,' was what Azula considered saying, perhaps absorbing the tribesman's humor through the earthy, fishy air of the place, but she remained mum and honed for what came next.

A crowd had begun to gather. Distant as they still were, leaning over porch railings and peeking through slatted shades, Suki made it a point to warn them: "Stay back! Avatar Aang may have stripped this monster of her Firebending" - Suki's katana trumpeted a piercing metal note and her bronze shield unfurled itself round her arm - "but I'll still risk no one else's safety!"

Sokka moved to protest - though he was quite doubtful of affecting any impact - but stopped short at the morose words mourned just behind him.

"I'm sorry, Sokka. I love you." Sokka felt his jaw drop in his mind as he turned and, in his periphery, glimpsed those cherubic brown eyes welling with sorrow and ageless joy. "All of you." He knew it. He knew she would do it. Always in the back of his mind, he knew never to trust a traitor. The fact that he had, that he ignored his better judgment all these years, made the squeeze of fingers sliding deep furrows into his back all the more painful. Every muscle fiber screamed like wailing kokyu strings and he tried briefly to join their chorus, but his breathe had fled him, allowing only a stunned gasp to escape.

Ty Lee let him down gently.

Suki was still locked in a combative stare-down with her opponent when she felt her wrist contort and her hand give up her sword. In the same instant, some knee pushed into the back of her leg, confounding her perfect balance entirely. A form rose up in front of her, still in that helplessly languid moment. Ty Lee! And Suki was on her stomach in the dirt. In five seconds she'd have her sword and, if the day was with her, it would be at her traitorous "friend's" throat.

But no. Not for what lay behind her, prone in the street, gasping breathlessly. Nothing else mattered now. Ty Lee be damned. Azula be damned.

Suki scuttled fervently to his side. There was only him, and what she could do to ease his pain in the featureless white landscape of their bond.

"It's the Palm of the Wandering Heart: one of the techniques I kept from you. All you can do now is be with him."

Suki wasn't listening, or if she was, she displayed no care for what the young Dim Mak master had to say.

Ty Lee turned to Azula, who was entirely stunned at what had transpired.

Almost entirely.

"Let's go, Azula." They began to walk. "And I think we should hurry," she whispered, feeling eyes on them from every direction. Now they were almost running. They didn't make it halfway down the road before the footsteps on roof tiles, a sweep of fabric through air, and a woman barred their path.

"You're done," Hei Lin rumbled, which was rather shocking to hear usher from a feminine throat, no matter how robust.

Kyoshi Island: where femme-fatales just fall out of the sky. At this point Azula began to question if Ty Lee was worth this trouble, but before she could dot her mental question mark she was on her friends heels bounding up a porch into a cottage.

It was a tight, narrow interior, all wood and flimsy paper doors. Something was sizzling, cooking on a stove. The kitchen: first doorway on the left. Closed room at the right. Somebody was in here. All this the instant Azula passed through the door.

"Trapped!" she barked, more annoyed than scared. Hei Lin was bounding up to the porch. No doubling back.

"Up!" responded her Kyoshi Warrior (formally) friend, as she flew up the stairwell just around the corner at the hallway's end. Seemingly without a touch of her foot on the wood steps, she was at the top of the staircase.

"Surprise!" and a ripping of papery scrim heralded Kanima as she burst through the window on top of the stairs. Her legs found Ty Lee - in point of fact, surprised - and wrapped around her torso. Arms grappled and the writhing female tangle rolled back down the stairs and found Azula - also, surprised.

As the two freshly estranged compatriots wrestled, Azula had problems of her own. The daunting Hei Lin was bearing down on her fast, faster than seemed possible for the woman who filled the hallway and stood half a head taller than Azula.

In spite of her comparatively diminutive stature, Azula met the challenge. She was apprehensive, but a faint hint of internal relish was enough to spur her forward into combat. For the first time in languid, lugubrious years, _single combat!_

Fists flew, arms locked, sharp jabs glanced off target, were parried by arms. Haymakers were nigh impossible in the cramped location, but Hei Lin swung two at strange angles to accommodate. Neither connected, but Azula could feel their gravity lurching by her and knew she would be done if one hit her anywhere. And now the ex-Firebender felt her breath leaving her, and she still had to escape after this. So she decided to hasten this battle to its end. She drew one of her honed black kunai and swiped it twice. The second slice, it clashed with Hei Lin's short dao. The red woman's foot shot out as the metal met, sending her opponent staggering back. Azula smirked, self-satisfied, and threw her weapon at her foe's face.

Hei Lin caught the stylet's handle, stopping the point dead an inch before her cheek. It was a spectacular catch, one that shocked Azula too long.

It came out of nowhere. (From the right, actually. The kitchen doorway next to her.) An iron frying pan splashing with hot chicken grease knocked her second dagger from her hand. The pan wielder dropped her weapon and retreated, grease sizzling upon her skin. She obviously hadn't thought the attack through.

Too much a distraction.

The looming Kyoshi Warrior brought her foe to a knee with a snap kick to the gut.

The short dao sliced at Azula's head. Perhaps with a week's, a month's, a year's more preparation - training dawn to exhausted dusk, reawakening that strength and speed demons would slice off their impenetrable unmentionables to possess - she could have blocked the keen steel whistling demise in her ear.

But she couldn't.

Luckily, the kitchen doorframe blocked it for her, taking the entire width of the blade halfway into itself. It could have been Azula's skull. It would have been, but close quarters and blind luck saved her and taught her to train a slight more extensively.

In a moment, a cunning plan came into her still intact braincase. She exploded up, knocking space between her larger foe and herself. Hei Lin growled and then caught the broad missile with both hands before it hit her in the face. The frying pan seared her palms and she let out a decidedly feminine yelp, dropping the cookware and her guard. It took an entire second, but Azula's elbow had ever bit of her weight and muscle behind it. The mighty blow hit Hei Lin like an armored-division blitzkrieg to the jaw. Crack! Down she went like a flimsy oak.

Azula, took a second to admire the opus of her struggle. Her body was still thrilling with energy, so much pent-up virile power. The ecstasy of fighting. The ecstasy of victory! She had no time to celebrate the feeling as it dropped from her when the hand grasped her shoulder like a steel vice from behind.

Ty Lee whipped her friend around and gave her a pull back toward the stairs. They hurdled the motionless heap of Kanima.

Both swung out the open window and onto the roof. Azula struggled to keep pace with her gymnastic friend. Gravity didn't seem to matter to her. By the slightest tug with her fingertips she could change the whole course of her body in midair. She was just the same as before. Better even. Quicker. More agile, if that was even humanly possible. Maybe Ty Lee had managed to surpass humanly possible. Bender's seem to do it all the time. Why couldn't she?

The leap to the next roof was nothing. Following that, the next leap ended with only one of Azula's feet finding the edge. Ty Lee was ahead, screaming haste at her partner. She leapt from a dead stop and landed effortlessly on the next roof. She made it look so vexingly simple!

Azula took a running leap. This gap came up on her wider than she had anticipated. And with no Firebending to jet her the remaining distance, gravity began to reclaim her. The precipice of the roof climbed past her feet. Past her knees. Past her waist. Not there yet. Past her shoulders. Still not there. Arms outstretched. Almost. Past her fingertips.

Not there.

_Snatch! _Ty Lee was almost hanging by the toes of her shoes over the edge, but she caught Azula's arm in hers, and, instinctively, Azula pitched her weight hard into a swing, a swing that her friend anticipated perfectly. The pendulous motion reached its apex. Azula recalled something - something she felt stupid for not trying in the first place - and drew her hook from her robe, digging into the roof and levering herself up.

"You're heavier," Ty Lee teased as they bolted out across the clay shingles once again.

"Having a child will do that. Now shush."

In a second story room, quite peaceful, with a white cat-owl snoozing in the corner and an elderly funk nestling into the gray wood, an old man hears footsteps. Footsteps… on his _roof?_

He burst through the shutters of his window. "What in the great white…?" Two blurs of feminine cloth leapt the gap between roofs, just over his bald head, and were gone. He paused a moment. "Eh…" he shrugged, and pulled himself back inside, unsurprised. Women scuttling over the tops of houses… nothing he hadn't seen before.

Gulls soaring the high thermals above the town could see the two hasty specks speeding toward the shore and the scuttling vibration of life, similar to the spreading wave tails trailing a lonely boat. The unrest spread, insects awoken to swarm erratically. Some chased to the dock. Most just scuttled. Two were intent on reaching the shore.

Miraculously, the boatmen who had engaged with Azula not minutes ago had made ready to leave, not at Lee's warning, but at his own discretion prompted by the all too familiar feeling of a gathering storm. In fact, the captain had already unmoored his craft and unfurled its sails. Azula leapt rather inelegantly aboard just as it began to slide down the dock. Recovering from her roll, she was shocked to see Ty Lee was stopped inches before the planking of the pier. She was staring. Longingly staring. Staring into the town.

Staring into her home of many years. And she was no longer welcome in her home. She wanted to cry.

The boat had already left the dock with a gap about the hulls length and slowly increasing.

Her silent goodbyes done, Ty Lee shot down the deck. The percussion of her feet on the wood was nearly a roll until she was flying, soaring! Something ethereal keeping her aloft and gliding, voraciously closing the distance. She was going to make it, and at that speed she was going to hit the boat like a cannon ball and rock the whole boat… not at all. The pixie landed lighter than goose-yak down. It was as though she hadn't even arrived, but there she was, standing on the precipice of the stern. She took one more look back. She had expected a shouty mob to filter in and collect on the landing to spit and menace and send her off. But none had bothered pursue. No friends. No goodbyes. Ty Lee hugged her arm and held back tears.

* * *

><p>Yumi, was frantic and disheveled, after a fashion: one hair out of place and the rest bristling with apprehension, her whole composure wracked. She was really wishing now that she was still back in the new city. Why now? Why did she have to come back to witness this.<p>

Osha was at his side, opposite Suki, kneading his muscles with naked hands, trying everything, applying her working knowledge of Dim Mak principles to soothing the damage, but it was futile. Her master hadn't taught her to deal with this kind of injury, and it was her master who had done the injuring.

Sokka managed one last quip. One final anecdote. A private one, reserved for the shining light cradling him there in his last waking moments.

"I'm always on your side, Suki."

There was no pain in his voice. Just calm.

The world flashed bright and haloed Suki like the angel she was. Then her face fell away at the edges, and he sank into cool darkness and rest.


	6. Cetacean Storm

-1_Rated T+ for Alcohol Use and Fantasy Monster Violence. XD_

**Cetacean Storm**

"There's no such thing as the Palm of the Wandering Heart Technique," Ty Lee twittered and giggled. They were the first words since leaving the island. She had overcome her lament for home surprisingly quickly. Azula assumed it was an act to mask her true feelings, but plucky always did seem to become Ty Lee, feigned or not. "Who names things like that, anyway?" Before she could explain any more, some final ropes were lashed and the helm locked. Dropping down out of the wheel house onto the deck, the captain, nose flaring, whiskers bristling more than usual, had words.

"Are you all fish-eyed in the skulls, or do ya just sympathize with the tuna's 'telligence?" Everyone else sat before him in their own corners of his ship. Ty Lee was well-postured at center aft. Azula slumped against the port bulwark. Lee mirrored his master on the starboard walling. All but the haughty woman were attentive, though most of his ire was for her. "I told you - I specifically took pains ta illustrate short of ink and trees - why you don't leave port with unfinished business blowin' in the wind."

Ty Lee raised her hand: "Um, I wasn't here for that."

He choked down some fury, but came back up like vomit. "Drown the Moon and-"

"What-?" but Azula couldn't finish her query over the brusque mariner's ranting. Perhaps she'd ask him later about the etymology of that carelessly uttered curse. She'd guessed at it, but always wondered what it really meant to those who wielded it so vehemently and so, somehow, reverently.

"-botross-raven slung round my neck and why herring-crows don't migrate! I wasn't nearly drunk enough to chance bringing all these galled forebodes out ta sea!"

"But apparently drunk enough to bring tired, angry, and, most importantly, _armed_ passengers out with you," Azula pointed out with a flash of her predatory golden eyes.

His eye twitched, his bared hands squeezed the empty air a couple times, and he looked like his next move would involve somebody going overboard. And judging by the needling glint of checked intensity that hid tellingly behind the eldest woman's leer, that somebody would probably be him. But instead of waxing violent, he made a rage-wobbled turn and disappeared into a hatch immediately behind him, making a point to slam the door shut with an indistinct nautical curse. He considered the hiring of a crew, if for no other reason than to even the odds for loathsome occasions like this.

After a pause, Azual spoke. "Ty Lee, returning to your convincing ruse back on Kyoshi, I am pleasantly impressed. Looks like I won't have to do your lying for you anymore."

Lee edged clumsily into the conversation for the chance to speak with the new and curiously comely little woman. "Sifu told me a bit about what you do. It's incredibly precision fighting, yeah? You must have been training forever."

"Hey!" Ty Lee exclaimed and then pouted: "I'm not that old."

"No, no, no, I didn't mean it like that! Heh… what I did mean was, you must have been training at least all your life."

Ty Lee was having fun with this boy's carefully polite aura, all flashy and florid when he thought he was out of line. It was cute. She liked it.

"Most of it," she amended, "but I had a great teacher, and it made all the difference. The most important thing he taught me is how to learn without him. He never taught me his style. He taught me mine. Or… had me teach myself mine. Hmm…" She gave into watching flutter-bee thoughts lilting just above her head.

"Are you sure he will recover," Azula readdressed.

"Sokka? Sure as a sunrise. It was a delicate move. Maybe even deadly if handled by a novice, but it's _me_. I know I hit him just right."

"Ty Lee, I was under the impression that you - even disregarding capability - could never take a life."

"That is still an accurate appraisal."

"Oh, so you _haven't_ changed?" she cannily responded, duly noting Ty Lee's big-girl-speak.

The pert woman let out a little laugh, but it was not the coltish giggle Azula remembered from her youth. It was short and breathy. Almost derisive. Almost like a laugh Azula herself might release from the depths of her superiority.

"Of course I have, Azula," Ty Lee said. It carried with it whispers of a question. An expectant affirmation that Azula had also changed. But the words carried something else with them.

They carried her name.

"_Azula?_"

"Who?"

"What?"

Lee, the reemerged captain, and Ty Lee reacted respectively:

Lee tried to catch enough breath as he almost choked on the infamous name. Inside him, the pillars holding the weight of years of knowledge and happy memories began to crack and buckle, crack and buckle. Beneath his feet, the foundations eroding like dunes.

The captain was not so disillusioned, though two recently emptied bottles in his right hand may have contributed to that. He was stunned, to be sure, and would have dropped the bottles if his strong family history wasn't holding it, but he was more perplexed than anything. It was just ludicrous math to figure out who in hazy history that name belonged to and believing that someone that mythic was sitting on his boat. Eh, stranger things had happened. Not to him, but… happened.

Ty Lee was confused, until it dawned on her that that may not be Azula's name anymore. But it still was. Hmm…

Azula's response encapsulated far less internal monologue. In fact, none at all:

"Dammit."

"Th-the Failed F-Fire Lord?" Lee stammered. Cracking.

"Where?" The captain, looked around stupidly. "Oh… Ohhh, _her_!" For some reason, there was no fright in the exclamation. Rather he seemed to have realized something obvious, like forgetting the keys to his vessel and remembering that he has no locks and no engine but the wind.

The young man held his chest and coughed up a laugh - a ludicrous, agonized laugh, "No. Can't be. It's too-"

"Yes, Lee," she sternly confessed. "'Azula' is my given name. I left it with my old life."

"Your old life!" Lee re-boggled. "Y-Y-You were the _Fire Princess_! That's… that's impossible." His voice took a steep plunge in volume, and his eyes seemed to follow it. His body contracted. Buckling.

"I believe it," the older man said with a wipe of his grainy stubble. "Got a whiff of royal on you. And ya seem crazy enough, though not so much enough to _pose_ as the Pheonix Harlot. That takes an awful keen kind of kerzy," and he replaced his period with a belch. Charming.

"Ain't that a fine kettle of lobster-squid? Now I've a Royal fireperson on board. What more to angry up Tui and Yue?" The air went electric and taught as if to answer. Too subtle to the inexperienced senses; however, the captain's were well past honed. But they did not have to be for this portentous atmosphere. He turned bow-ward. "Aww…!" he moaned.

"What now?" Azula snipped.

"That's a storm comin'."

"What are you going to do?"

"Me?" The captain threw his bottles over the side. "I'm gonna prepare."

"You seem _prepared_ enough."

The captain said nothing, but spun around to reevaluate the briskly encroaching horizon: the looming storm clouds, spitting lighting and typhoons from their bulbous bellies and raking the ocean into a frenzied foam of mammoth waves.

He looked back at Azula, who saw the same roiling in the distance. She didn't argue the point. The sailor left to get a drink. A barrel might do. Or two.

All the while, Lee muttered to himself crazily, dolefully, "You're not her. That's not… not her… not _her_…"

Ty Lee looked from the deteriorating boy to the stoic woman who needled him with an unfeeling gaze. "Azula, are you going to…"

"Quiet!" she snarled. It was difficult to keep her composure, what with the chasing and the annoying mariner and her impossible task. And now the confession of her origins on top of that. But Azula reflected and calmed. It was bound to happen, sooner rather than later now that the stakes had escalated.

"Lee. It's true. And no matter how hard you will it to the contrary, it will not change. I am Azula of Ozai, former princess of the Fire Nation and bearer of an ever lengthening list of unsavory titles."

"Ozai! I lived with Fire Lord Ozai! Lived with Fire Lord Ozai!"

Lee couldn't feel the boat beneath him. It had split away. The air escaped skyward. All was suffocating closeness, stinging needles of warmth or cold. He couldn't tell. No air. Drowning. The deck was gone and he was sinking, drowning. Nothing to hold onto. Sinking, drowning. Nothing was real anymore, the boat, the women, the air, the sky all ghastly specters that feigned substance but were hollow lies. Only a sea of drowning.

All the while, Azula sat there, unmoved.

Ty Lee remembered her old partner's fearsome demeanor in a flood of nightmarish recollection. Still, she was concerned. "Azula, I'm not telling you how to… well, don't you think you should… I don't know, comfort your son more in this?"

"Lee is not my son," she responded flatly.

"Oh! I guess that makes sense. He does seem a couple years too old. But then, why is he with you?"

"Because he's a man, now, out to protect his aunty from the wide, scary world," Azula explained just a hint sardonic.

"You're not my aunty," he cou-rooed gently, a tinge baleful, like a wounded turtle dove.

Azula's report was swift and decisive. "No. No, I'm not. And I never was. I have always been myself, no matter how I dressed it up." A report of thunder. She began to feel lighter, freer. A long wet concealment was sliding off her back, slowly. She could feel it. Light was coming. Lightning nearing.

"Azula," her empathic friend scolded weakly.

"I'm not going to gloss this over for him!" The sail snapped with a gust. "I'll treat him with the same respect and dignity reserved for any other man."

"Well it doesn't look like there's much respect there." A raindrop.

Azula looked to Ty Lee, who had found some bluster and justified contempt for Lee's mistreatment. "There's nothing to soften this, Ty Lee." A harsh wave on the hull. "If you want to console him, by all means. But it's up to him to come to terms with who I am.

"He's lived with me most of his life, and, if he's listened to anything I've taught him, he knows to disregard all the hearsay and quasi-political sensationalism and focus on the empirical truth of how I treated him and conducted myself around him. He knows who I am better than anyone, him and his mother both. He knows just fine!"

"Why are you yelling this at _me_?" Ty Lee glared.

"Because _he_ doesn't need to be told, but _you_ obviously do!" Something was wrong. Azula didn't feel lighter. Light hadn't come. Instead, she was off balance. Her stomach lurched as if she was falling up. It was dark. It was dark.

It was dark.

And then the rain started.

All at once the sea rose and lifted the substantial vessel like a tiny leaf on the waves. They rose so high that a crack of thunder felt like a straight punch to their bare hearts, it was so close. Then a pause. Then falling, they floated from the deck, falling, weightless, sheer falling down the face of a mountainous wave into a valley, into an angry sea of roving oceanic peaks, summits frothing, lightning lancing, rain falling in sheets. Lee hugged the deck, while Azula failed to find her feet. The vessel evened out at the base of the valley. Even Ty Lee's immaculate balance was tremulous.

And the storm had just begun.

"What do we do?" Ty Lee screamed over the earsplitting wind and crashing chorus of a thousand waves.

The other woman blinked, aghast. "What? You're the one who's been living in a fishing village! Don't tell me you-" a renegade wave smashed the deck like a hammer and crushed both Ty Lee and Azula under its freezing liquid weight. When the water cleared, though her lithe friend had managed to stay up on one knee, Azula was laid out flat.

Anger smoldered inside her. She coughed up a gout of brine, and drew in a deep hissing breath reflexively. Had she her Firebending still she would have vaporized the next wave. But her martial talent was so much damp ash, and the wave struck her, though she managed to keep in a kneel. She was soaked with ponderous weight. Her robes were of lead. Looking up, she noticed Ty Lee had grabbed a line strung from the boom, which was swaying wildly. As strong as she was, she did not have to weight to reign in the sail and was flung around like a rag-doll. Azula went to help, snatching the rope as well, but she was flung around just as easily until another rogue wave knocked staggered her, followed by yet another wall of foaming fury that threw both of the women down on the deck once more. Both their hands were stripped raw by the rope. Azula would have laughed at the burning irony on her palms if she weren't so enraged. She fished in her heavy cloak and, after some effort, yanked a pair of gloves free. The deck was awash: a sloshing lake.

They were sinking. Not into the water, but rather the ocean surface was sinking. The waves were getting higher around them. Only a matter of time before they fell.

The assaulting waves seemed to start. A pocket of calm spread. It gave Azula a chance to stand. As she pulled her gloves on, she saw the cause for concern. She saw him.

"Are you completely drunk?" she said, smelling - even in the storm - the keen sting of liquor wafting from the sailor.

"On'ly shhhlightly thoroughly."

Azula's face, though not by much, did drop. She wasn't hallucinating. The liquor stink really was radiating from him.

"_!" _He was roaring drunk - roaring to frighten the furious ocean and as drunk as if all the waters of the world had mulled to hard vintage and been, in one drag, imbibed to the dregs. "That look o' yers es almos' wort' drown…in'. Yeeas I 'em! Drunk e'nough for a bat'lf'elds's wort' of sorrowf'l dead. Drunk 'nough for a Royal Flame. Drunk enough to spit in the face of God!" He shook an empty bottle at the sky before casting it aside.

The timber sailing vessel moiled within whirlpool after slavering whirlpool. Waves leapt wantonly. Such was the hurricane gale that waves formed on waves. The soaring walls of water around them swarmed with minion waves. A baying, swinging, hissing, busting, splurge of animation that defied all concepts of life. But when the captain took the whirring helm in his undeniable grip, the wheel stopped, the rudder went stiff and the ship, though still thrashing, gained some semblance of control. With the little he gained, the sailor began steering through the clashing currents. After a moments struggle, they began to ascend from the canyon pit between waves. They climbed the near sheer face of the liquid cliff, at last bursting over the precipice and leveling out on a plateau of ocean. It was just as tumultuous, but at least they weren't surrounded anymore.

"Sei! Willya look at _that!_"

The Fire Nation women were agog. All their senses left them as they beheld the creatures. Surrounded again.

Leatherback Gorilla-Whales.

A pod of them, nearing a score, all spread out all around the ship, each covering miles with their girth. Immeasurably majestic rorquals with carapace landscapes covered in a slick coat of jet hairs, each at least as thick 'round as the vessels mainmast, all rolled their black backs out of the tempestuous waves as a living archipelago. One stroked with its arm, as long as a railroad and as thick 'round as a city sprawl, the Bastille fingers raking the plush dark sky. Another breached, closer but still miles away. It's soaring snout rising into the sagging storm clouds. As the maw gaped, bristling with alpine fangs, its throat bulged and drew the ponderous storm cloud in. The great squall sputtered and fell into a throe of exploding. It frantically cast a battery of lightning bolts against its predators enormous head, spitting and screaming, but finally pulled down like a preyed bovine, swallowed by the monumental being. It crashed down and tsunamis welled up around its landing.

Ty Lee leapt away. Another wave smacked Azula, but this time she struck back at it. It sent her staggering, but she stayed upright. A small victory. A short lived one, as well, since another wave broke on the bow and engulfed the boat entirely for several panic-stricken seconds. When they resurfaced, the wayfarers were faced with a new set of horrors, each translucent orange and throbbing with tentacles wriggling from them, eyes the size of plates locked wide open, and two massive pinchers swinging from thick tendril arms.

"Get 'em lob'squid off me ship, belles!" screamed the captain as he turned between a cleft in the endless walls of water.

Ty Lee was already on it. Literally. She flew into the thing on the peak of the bow, feet first, and they became a flurry of fists and bruised wormy arms. And the scream. The lithe fighter's grunts and the monkey-screech of the crustacean pierced even the howl of the gale and the hiss of the waves.

Azula used a more "cutting" tactic. Again, literally. With daggers drawn, she parted the creatures appendages from its body one by one. It knelled for each lost arm. Once, one of its massive pincers almost clipped Azula's leg from her thigh. That was cause for slicing off the pincers with a couple hacks. When her foe was disarmed, she hefted the wailing body over the edge and looked to her comrade.

Ty Lee had already beaten her opponent back into the hellish depths from whence it came and had thrown off her tunic and shirt, stripped to a skimpy black top. There was no softness about her. Though thin, she was entirely toned sinew. She was also very focused on the sky as she wrapped her hands tight with torn strips of her autumn sash. Azula looked up and saw two more of the creatures hanging from the sail and the peak of the mast. A second later, Ty Lee had shimmied up the mast and was locked in another wrestling match with the highest squid. This time, her bestial cries overwhelmed even the creature's.

Azula took a cue from her friend and escaped her sopping robes. They slapped hard on the slick deck. It felt like dropping a house from her shoulders. She could leap into the clouds she felt so relieved. It must have been how Ty Lee felt all the time. However, reality, the stinging, oppressive wind, and another wave made her realize her limits quickly.

"Git that crabber before et shreds mi sa'l!" commanded the helmsman. The last thing Azula needed was a command, but she ignored it as she searched her soaked clothes for something.

The captain, noticing that the three of the older woman weren't doing what the two of him asked, thee decided to climb the mast and do it thimself. He combine and noticed that the smaller babes was wrenching another orange blob loose above. Before he could ask if they needed help, both of her and the blob fell as the mast swung sideways and hung over the open ocean. The creature fell back into the water, but Ty Lee wrapped a hand around the sailor's wide neck and swung around it back down to the deck. It all happened so fast, he wasn't sure it had happened. It must have though, because there they were. He guffawed healthily.

Back on the deck, Azula drew a special dagger out of her pile of soaked cloths. It dropped and hovered then she set it to spinning before flinging it. The metal nailed a joint in the lobster-squid's reticulated body. With a twist and jerk of her arms, the filament tied to the bodkin went taught, tore the slimy crustacean from its purchase, and yanked it down to the deck with a crispy splat. In one more move Azula whipped the creature sailing into the air and, at the apex of the arc, jerked the metal from the wriggling horror. It flew quite a distance, its Lovecraftian scree fading, before a wave tackled it laterally and bore it back into its watery abode.

"Azula!" Ty Lee screamed in warning. The other woman turned, ready and willing to face her next opponent. Until she saw who it was. Lee, stood and spasmed like a madman. Like a wild mongrel. Something soulless and hateful. His tortured face was countless times more frightening than the squid monsters. Azula had a heart flipping realization: one of them was going to die.

And it wasn't going to be her.

Before she could bring her weapon to bear, the young man turned and ran clumsily across the tipping deck toward the stern. Toward the ocean. He meant to throw himself into the crushing waves!

Azula hand never moved faster in her life. Halfway over the edge, she grabbed Lee and pulled him back before wedging him against the bulwark, fists wringing his collar. He was vacillating between whimpering flight and an aggressive move to fight her outright.

"Listen," she wailed, "you may not like it, it may shake you down to your marrow, but I'm not going to force you to accept me. This is who I was and who I… who I still am and that's all there is to it. I can't escape it, but you have a choice. You can leave. I wouldn't fault you for leaving me."

Her voice had calmed, though it was still a step below screaming due to the wind. He, too, had calmed. "I never hurt you, and I never will, but if my history unsettles you that much, then you can go." She tightened her grip. "But not now. Not like this. Not by drowning. You're not dying to save yourself from me." As much as there could be in the storm, there was a silence between the two of them. "You don't have to." Her last words weren't just for Lee. They were also for her. They were also for _him_.

With that, she released the sopping, fresh-faced youth from her grip and stood. He looked up at her with awe, terror, and understanding all at once, tears and snot washing down his cheeks with the relentless rain. She stood against the waves, long black mane drenched, every muscle tensed.

A kinked trident of lightning cleft the sky and cleaned the waking world white for an instant. More bolts followed, stabbing into the frenzied skin of the ocean, snaking across the sky and knelling with pure white rage: the fleeting ghosts of dragons splitting reality with their impossibly powerful souls.

She looked up to the captain who still hung from the mast, flapping like a fat flag. An ecstatic whooping banner of a man. A lobster-squid flew out at him from a nearby wave. He punched it straight in the eye and it bounced off his fist back where into the foam. He yawped, and it struck Azula. He is exactly where he belongs. He is the most honest thing alive in this very moment.

He is this dead dragon lightening. He is this behemoth pod. He is this ocean. He is this madness!

Driving cold rain stinging her exposed skin like a swarm of kamikaze syrup-bees. Her muscles soaked with remembered dynamic, exuberant, zealous, sultry, vigorous vitality. The tang of electricity delighted upon her tongue. A taste that arced straight into her teeth, into her skull, behind her eyes, deep in the slithering base of her brain. That thrill returned to her, but this tumult, for all its wanton fury, was willing to allow her the rush. The waves stopped striking her. They seemed sympathetic to her, even. Cheering around her.

She faltered. She questioned this resurgence within her, this realization of hungers she had let atrophy. She tried, forced herself to remember why she had suppressed these frightening notions. For her maintained anonymity? For Peace? For her freedom? For her son? She tried to remember. She tried in vain.

And somewhere in the astonishing fathoms of Azula's own drown, bloated, and lost insanity, a gurgle of trapped putrescence belches up, and she finds it sapid. A sweet dead instinct in her rotted wilds. It isn't just the vitality of the fight. She remembers. She remembers her careless adolescent joy. Only a taste. And - even if only vicariously through this drunken seafarer, through those breaching behemoths, through this raging hurricane - she revels in that memoriam. She is this madness!

Another cetacean colossi breached. Its dark back to them. Only a mile away. It filled the horizon like a rising continent. Breaching to kiss the sky. Its throat swelled.

"Cover your ears or lose your heads!" screamed the captain as he fell from the mast deftly. Everyone held their heads tight and watched the slow lurch of the ocean parting down to the unfathomable depths. A being so massive as to be too large to see in a single gaze, hanging there between the sea and the sky in the soundless tumult. Its throat swelled, held, and…

The roar cracked the heavens. The blare seemed as though come from a battle horn the size of a palace, the toll itself made of history's every thunder and all the Fire Nation's molten steel. At the Gorilla-Whale's irresistible command, the storm clouds fled in all directions, a great circular scattering faster than the lightning could retract, spread to the horizons.

With a great flop, the colossus crashed back into the sea, sending tsunamis out from its flanks. The spray and foam settled. The stray waves subsided. The dark patches drifted away peacefully, not disrupting the exhausted ocean surface anymore. Peacefully away like the shadows of clouds. The sky was blue and calm, as was the sea. The drunkard, the plucky gymnast, the growing young man, and even the waspish mother smiled up into the sun and misty breeze. The light had finally come.

**Authorial Note: **

**I offer this afterward to offer a bit of insight into my eccentric and wondrous writing process (for those of you inclined to care). Some may notice that I tend to be rather ruthless with any hapless character unfortunate enough to come under my spelling. Especially unfortunate are my own characters, as they have no other creative or fanatic hands holding them up, aside from my own. I have butterfingers. Or perhaps its more like a tendency to strangle.**

**Let it be known that no character I have ever created is unloved. It may be a deranged sort of love (crazy like hybristophilia, perhaps) - airing on the high side of hate or the low side of sympathy or the right side of derision - but it is pure love, all the same. That said, I kill some of those characters and mutilate some of them. An odd thing to do to someone you love. But it is because I love them, that they are allowed the courtesy of pain and death. "Courtesy?" you ask. Well, yes. They deserve to develop as they need to develop, and I will not stifle them with favoritism. (Sounds like I'd make an awful parent, or maybe a great one…?) All characters deserve the same range of experiences that we physical folk are afforded. They should be able to experience and cope with loss, find joy in revelation, and be able to take their lives into their own, however fictitious, hands.**

**But one resultant advantage stemming from this ruthlessness is the reputation. That reputation keeps the reader more keenly aware of the stakes that my characters are facing. Consequences are real. People can die. That charges the narrative with more weight and intensity. Or maybe I'm just a jerk. In any case, no harm done. Just a fiendish 'gotcha' moment. I sidestepped any actual killing of a canon character.**

**Or did I? XD**


End file.
